In a number of automated, computer-assisted and/or robotic surgical operations performed on a surface of a body, such as hair transplantation surgery, image-guidance is used to guide one or more surgical tools to perform a given procedure. Such image guidance typically relies on computing devices to process images used to guide the surgical tools. For example, one or more computing devices may process one or more images in order to track objects and/or positions of objects as part of the hair transplantation or other surgical process. By way of another example, one or more computing devices may process one or more images to identify facial and/or other features of persons or other creatures present in the images. In such processing, the computing device or devices may perform a variety of operations such as modeling and analyzing the image(s), comparing images, and/or various other operations.
In many cases of image-guided surgical procedures on body surfaces, computing devices used for the procedures may process images under one or more time constraints. For example, computing devices may process images in a sequential series, such as frames of one or more videos. In such situations, a computing device may need to finish processing one or more received frames before subsequent frames are received in order to avoid dropping frames. By way of another example, image processing performed for automated and/or computer-assisted surgical operations may need to be completed within time constraints in order to prevent surgical errors due to patient movement, lag in guidance or machine direction, and/or other such potential problems.